Washington DC -
Oh yes, the “Games People Play.” That Joe South song was a big hit in 1968 and subsequently covered by an astonishing 194 artists. People play many games, all the time - beneficial, destructive, and otherwise - especially in the politically depraved times of this town.
In his 2022 book “Seven Games: A Human History,” Eric Roeder traces the interlocking histories of more benign games such as checkers, chess, Go, poker, backgammon, Scrabble, and bridge.
Roeder notes that AI-enabled machines now universally beat humans in all these games with the exception of bridge. That may be because of the two-person, team nature of bridge. It’s more likely, Roeder asserts, that not enough people care about bridge any more to invest the time and money in developing an AI challenger.
Deep Blue (IBM) set the stage in toppling chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997 and the AI-driven AlphaGo (Google Deep Mind) defeated 9-dan Go professional Lee Sedol in 2016.
What we’re learning in more recent years, however, and what Roeder illustrates in his book, is that humans working in partnership with AI perform better than either AI or humans alone. Kasparov said it well in Roeder’s book, “that a computer and a human sitting side-by-side, a cyborg playing the pieces together, is stronger than any machine on its own.”
And that’s the key to the future. You see, it’s not a simplistic, “us versus them” binary construct; it’s a synthesis, a dialectic of sorts. To be constructive and productive, however, it requires human willingness to engage in the technology. Otherwise machines will win. This is not a time for burying heads in the sand. Yes folks, the elephant in the room these days is an ostrich.
Still, it’s understandable why many people - including young people booing commencement speakers who dare mention AI - fear and loathe it. The tech bros are never to be trusted, for sure. Their concern is greed and dominance, not societal need and readiness. Left to their own devices their approach to AI could and likely will present grave risks to our world.
That said, AI is a tool. In the right hands, or at least with enough of the right hands influencing its development in ethical and moral terms, it can serve broader public purpose. That’s why an ostrich-like pose serves nobody.
AI will eliminate many jobs, which is devastating albeit inevitable, though not as many jobs or as soon as some prognosticators declare. On the other hand, AI will create new kinds of jobs with people working in tandem with it - not running away from it - in what The New York Times’ Bill Wasik calls the “hybrid human-AI workforce.” No, not science fiction cyborgs, at least any time soon, but intelligent human beings powered by even greater intelligence. Well, at least we can only hope.
